In China, the drug utilization of traditional Chinese medicine plants has a long history, and the Chinese medicines extracted from Chinese medicine plants by decoction of them in water, wine and so on are extensively used and have saved a lot of lives in history. Modern research shows that many a traditional Chinese medicine plant takes effect through its flavonoid compounds, separate out single ingredient to prepare modern drugs, for example, Chinese patent application CN1113909A, CN1371372A and so on. However, due to numerous ingredients of traditional Chinese medicine, medicinal mechanism is hard to reveal completely. In particular, synergistic mechanisms between different ingredients or between their ingredients and other drugs are too complicated for modern medicine to reveal, even the more researched Radix Glycyrrhizae (also called lantern, matsumura leafflower herb, liquorice, Lu grass, powder grass, canton hedyotis herb, sacharum spontaneum, polypogon fugax), the ingredients in extracts of which include glycyrrhizic acid, licoflavone, liquirit igenin, liquiritin, glabridin, Chalcone and so on. The therapeutic effectiveness among ingredients, therapeutic effectiveness and therapeutic effectiveness stability between their ingredients and other drugs are seldom studied. Therefore, the drugs extracted and prepared with traditional Chinese medicine plants are generally only utilized in pharmaceutical products of China, India, Japan and other countries.
Chinese medicine prescription and traditional Chinese medicine preparation are commonly used for therapy in Chinese medicine, but the therapeutic effectiveness is not stable. The reason lies in the difficulty in getting knowledge of the correlation of Chinese medicine ingredients in Chinese medicine prescription and medicine preparation with indications. Moreover, there is a significant link between Chinese medicine ingredients and extraction method, extracting materials as well as material standards, which means a slightest difference in initial materials would lead to totally different drug efficacy. Therefore, though the concept that traditional Chinese medicine is natural has been widely acknowledged among patients in the United States and Europe, and they are utilized for therapy and health care, the stability of therapeutic effectiveness restrict its promotion and application in these areas.
After long-term research, the inventor surprisingly thought out an all new idea of extracting liquorices extracts with simplified preparation process, which reserves one or various effective ingredients. Even though the application of different liquorices materials results in great difference in effective ingredients of extracts (e.g. extracts may not contain Chalcone A or contain the preferred Chalcone A), they are all therapeutically effective in anti-tumor or lowering glucose and lipid, especially when they are combined with other anti-tumor or glucose-and-lipid-lowering drug, the synergistic effect can be enhanced, accordingly to reduce the dose of active pharmaceutical ingredient (especially the ingredient with strong side effect) and greatly improve the safety of medication use.